LONGMONT -- The prevalence of cellphones with built-in cameras means that millions of people are walking around with the means to make fine-art photographs everywhere they go.

The cameras are more often employed in that modern form of narcissism, the updating of social media profile images. You know the drill: Hold the phone out at arm's length or stand in front of a mirror and make a self-portrait. Other cellphone camera categories: friends at parties, out-the-window shots on the highway, proud-parent kid shots, Arab Spring demonstration documentation, concerts, great-looking entrees and citizen journalism. One of the first very famous cellphone photos was an image taken by a bystander in 2009 of the floating U.S. Airways plane that landed in the Hudson River as its passengers disembarked.

Advertisement

Others, however, do use the phone cameras to make art. It's possible, with today's increasingly powerful technology, to snap and edit high-quality photographs right on the phone -- the kind of photographs worthy of gallery treatment.

Firehouse Art Center and its art director, Jessica Kooiman, acknowledge and celebrate this evolution of the photographic arts with "Phone-Ography," an exhibition of photographs taken and processed on phones. The show was juried by Longmont photographer Maureen Ruddy Burkhart, and it includes about 40 images from 15 artists. (The photos are for sale, and they're priced to sell.) A reception for the show is scheduled for 6 to 9 p.m. today, and the exhibit runs through Jan. 7.

Sharon Vanorny's "feet ceiling" won first place honors in the exhibition "Phone-Ography."
(Courtesy photo)

A glance at the work in the show does not instantly reveal fundamental distinctions between phone and traditional photography, largely because modern technology permits users to make high-quality images and because the mechanics of making phone photographs is not much different than they ever were. You point the camera at your subject and push a button.

Stephanie Hilvitz, a busy Longmont artist, contributed several photos to the show, including a close-up image of a bowl of shells. The work's shallow depth of field and general earnestness make it completely suitable for a greeting-card cover.

Spend some time with the "Phone-Ography" collection, however, and some phone-specific qualities suggest themselves. A lot of the photos are square, which is a function, at least in part, of the emphasis on the square frame in Instagram and other mobile phone apps. They often contain an immediacy and ingenuousness that gives a window on where people are during their regular lives, not where they are because they went looking for pictures. Another Hilvitz photo in the show, a square one, is "Bored in Dallas," which shows three travelers on the move in Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and the viewer assumes the photographer was sitting there killing time by snapping pictures of what she saw in front of her.

Another common quality is a vintage veneer. Thanks, again, goes to Instagram and similar apps that allow users, with a simple click, to overlay photos with preset filters that give a modern photo the look of one taken decades ago. It's easy to deride this practice as faux authenticity, as if it's like fake wood paneling on a car, but many pictures just look better with it.

Burkhart awarded first-place honors to "feet + ceiling," a (square) image by Sharon Vanorny in "Phone-Ography." It's a photo of a person high on a ladder whose upper body is obscured in a ceiling where one of the panels has been removed. The composition and the circumstance of a half-visible body are the image's intrinsic assets, but it benefits from an apparent Instagram-style filter that makes it feel worn, as if pulled from grandma's photo album from the 1970s.

Besides the juried section of the show, it features the work of two artists, Burkhart and Karen Divine, whose phone photography demonstrates the extraordinary possibilities of the genre. Divine's pictures, especially, will cause phoneography initiates to stop and ask, "Was that really done on a phone?" She goes way beyond facile use of app presets to create otherworldly composite images that give deep expression to her restless imagination. Their means of production might be novel, but what she produces transcends those means.

Burkhart similarly uses an iPhone to take and manipulate images that are worth attention irrespective of how they were made.

Photography itself for a long time struggled to attain status as fine art on the level of painting and other high-minded mediums. Divine, Burkhart and other artists in "Phone-Ography" are part of the vanguard of photographers who are elevating phone photos from Facebook walls to gallery walls, and no one who sees their work will look at their phones the same way again.

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.

The Boulder alt-country band gives its EPs names such as Death and Resurrection, and its songs bear the mark of hard truths and sin. But the punk energy behind the playing, and the sense that it's all in good fun, make it OK to dance to a song like "Death." Full Story